Study shows Talk Therapy can help bring down deaths caused by suicide

The findings of a new research point out that talk therapy which involves short term counseling can help lower suicide rates significantly. Suicide is known to be one of the ten leading causes of death in the United States. Nearly 1 million Americans try to end their own lives every year- and every forty seconds, someone somewhere in the world commits suicide. The results of this new finding could help cut down the suicide rate hugely.

Talk therapy, according to the Mental Health Foundation in UK, works by helping weed out negative thoughts and enabling the suspects see things from a fresh perspective after infusing fresh, positive energy. Opening your mind to a trained therapist can help fight anxiety, depression, addiction, eating disorder and phobia, an NHS Choices report shows.

65,000 people in Denmark who attempted suicide were covered as a part of this study which was carried over 18 years. Researchers selected 5,678 people who attended psychological therapy and compared them to 17,304 people who did not receive any intervention programs.

“At the end of a 20-year follow-up of the participants, researchers found that the psychological therapy was highly effective in preventing suicides and mortality risk. Effects of the therapy became stronger with the participants receiving longer intervention programs. Participating in the talk-therapy based intervention program- reduced risk of future suicides by 27 percent and death by 38 percent in the first year. Similarly, by the tenth year, only 229 per 100,000 committed suicide compared to 314 per 100,000 in the control group.”

“Now we have evidence that psychosocial treatment—which provides support, not medication—is able to prevent suicide in a group at high risk of dying by suicide,” said Dr. Annette Erlangsen who was one of the co-authors of this study.

The study did not, however, underline the exact factor in the therapy which helped bring down the rate of suicide.

The study has been published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry and details research conducted by scientists with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in regards to the efficacy of psychosocial counseling.

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